


Right Number, Wrong Shop

by RootsOfOurRemiges



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: A Rather Different Sort Of Homophobia, E.M. Forster's Maurice Is Very Lovely And Healing By The Way, Earth Is Wonderful But Also Baffling And Frustrating, Gay Male Character, Giving Aziraphale The Inspiration To Save This From Just Being A Grumpy Subtweet Of A Story, Going Ahead And Recommending It In These Tags, M/M, Specifically His Optimism, Thank Crowley For Crowley
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-24
Updated: 2021-01-24
Packaged: 2021-03-16 23:20:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,143
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28964523
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RootsOfOurRemiges/pseuds/RootsOfOurRemiges
Summary: Sometimes a step backward comes disguised as a step forward. But sometimes that backward step still presents an opportunity, to go back and offer a hand to those who were left behind.
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Comments: 8
Kudos: 34





	Right Number, Wrong Shop

For at least the third time in as many weeks, Crowley stirred from his regular afternoon doze among the plush cushions of Aziraphale's bookshop sofa, roused by yet another thorny telephone exchange just in time to catch its abrupt ending.

Each time this happened, it seemed Crowley always awoke with exactly the same thought: finding himself, once again, at a complete loss as to why the angel’s shop still even _had_ a public landline. 

“Yes, I am _quite_ sure.” Aziraphale’s voice was high and strained, with the sort of patience that was given to bending rather than breaking. “I have been openly, contentedly homosexual for a great many years, and happily committed to a wonderful _male_ partner at that. I’m afraid that quite definitely precludes any sort of interest on my part in the _proverbial velvet underground_ , as he would put it, though I’m sorry to hear that you’ve been told otherwise. I should like to think—hello? Oh, bother.” 

Crowley rolled over with a whine at the tone emitted from the disconnected call, watching Aziraphale gingerly set the phone back into its cradle with a weary sigh. Crowley knew that sigh well, a long exhale through Aziraphale’s nose as he removed his reading spectacles to massage at his closed eyelids. 

He propped himself up on an elbow, burning with curiosity, but with one look at Aziraphale’s face it was obvious that _first_ things first was snapping the front sign to CLOSED, and with any luck locking out all further strife for the day.

And, after that, wordlessly raiding the back room’s trove of casks for just the right wine to suit a good tipsy kvetch. If ever there was an occasion that called for one, it was these. As routines went, it was close to rounding the corner into tradition. 

Aziraphale’s eyes brightening in gratitude as Crowley poured his glass signaled that that had most _definitely_ been the right call. 

“So, what did I miss this time?” Crowley asked, finally pouring his own and getting himself seated semi-upright again. 

"Oh, only about eleven precious minutes I won’t be getting back, I’m afraid.” Aziraphale waved his hand as if to dismiss the stretch of time itself into nonexistence. Crowley frowned. 

“Tell me I’m being too nosy if you like, but you've got me nursing a helluva curiosity for how a business call devolves into somebody— _if_ I parsed all that—interrogating your exclusivity to cock. Bit of a different stock than your usual _‘where’s my imaginary out-of-print first edition with a title I can’t remember,’_ isn’t it?”

Aziraphale took a _very_ long drink. He cradled the glass two-handed against his chest, a pensive look coming over him. 

“I hesitate to even dignify it with a retelling, but it started cordially enough, I suppose.” Mind made up, Aziraphale settled in, letting Crowley top up his glass before continuing. “She was a curator, as I understand it, for some manner of digital project documenting the culture of Soho. Photography, poetry and artwork, interviews with long-standing local businesses, and such.” 

“ _Culture of Soho_ , as in—?” Crowley gestured vaguely between Aziraphale and himself, and Aziraphale nodded. 

“Just so. From me, she was interested in quotations, some of my favorite literary passages that I felt spoke to... well, she used a rather different term, but my own experience as an older gay gentleman, at any rate. And why, all that sounded perfectly lovely to me! I was delighted to grant her some of my time.”

“But...?”

“ _But_ , indeed. Getting there, love. I took a few moments to make my selections, and,” Aziraphale paused mid-thought, leaning towards his desk to pluck a glossy black hardcover from the stack. He ran stout gentle fingertips along the bold fuschia lettering of its title, _Maurice_ , and the golden lettering of its author, E.M. Forster, fond reminiscence in his smile. “I had the pleasure of meeting Forster myself, you know. His circle of friends—Isherwood, Carpenter, Reid, and so on—they had some mutual associates with my own corners. I suspect _most_ of our persuasion likewise had some overlap in our circles during those days, but I digress. There was a passage here in particular,” he said, thumbing through to find the page. “Ah, here.”

Crowley craned his neck to look, as Aziraphale donned the little reading glasses again and recited aloud. 

“ _‘He would not deceive himself so much. He would not—and this was the test—pretend to care about women when the only sex that attracted him was his own. He loved men and always had loved them. He longed to embrace them and mingle his being with theirs. Now that the man who returned his love had been lost, he admitted this.’_ Written 1913, published 1971. Hence the rather modern cover.”

“1971...” Crowley echoed, softly. Absorbed every layer of meaning in that year and its close proximity, all that change and turmoil convergent on a few narrow bands of history’s vast calendar, on scales both world-shaking and dearly personal. The significance to Aziraphale in particular, unspoken but brimming from the content of the passage. But the story was not yet finished, and Crowley extracted himself from the burrow of his musings. “Wait, so that was a _problem?_ ” 

Aziraphale nodded, with just enough drama to be playful. An encouraging sign of levity, punctuated by a prim if rather unsteady sip from his glass, a little dart of tongue catching the stray droplet on his upper lip. 

“It was, I’m afraid. She stopped me after that,” Aziraphale said, playing up his pout for Crowley’s benefit. “All very polite still, but that sort of passage wasn’t _what the project was looking for_ , I learned. And well, I would have been happy to find something else, but whyever not this one? I had to ask.”

Crowley unfolded himself from his seat, crossing the room to pluck a second bottle that he suspected he and Aziraphale would inevitably be needing very soon. 

“Go on, angel. Still listening.”

“Right, right. In rather more words, what she told me in essence was that Forster’s phrasing set the _wrong tone,_ too much like a gate closing to lock out possibilities when the vision for the project is meant to be more _welcoming_ , you see. I was... ah, _delicately_... invited to peruse a website on the matter.” 

“Ohhhhhhh. Yep.” Crowley had fallen off a good half-dozen social media habits over the last year-and-some-change, having pruned his garden of hobbies in giving Quality Time With Aziraphale more room to grow. Still, some hubs of demonic activity in this world were unavoidable, among them Instagram. And TikTok. “I see how we got here.”

“Illuminating, is it not? But yes, I found all that to be a rather uncharitable reading of the experience Forster wished to convey, and I hoped perhaps I could clarify as much. Things took a rather more _personal_ turn after that, and, well, I believe that was where you found us.” Aziraphale closed his eyes with a little disappointed huff, shaking his head. “Of all the surprises this world comes up with to keep me on my toes, I must admit I was ill-prepared for this one.” 

“What, that it’s apparently an act of cold-hearted malice to give the old _‘thanks, but no thanks’_ to the opposite sex?” Crowley accompanied the remark with his best sardonic grin, though it slightly faltered in his struggle with undoing the wax closure on the new bottle. (Not one of his prouder innovations, that.) 

“It would appear so. Why, it’s almost as if—” Aziraphale glanced up to see Crowley was now resorting to teeth. “Oh here, dearest, allow me.” 

Crowley relinquished the bottle, and with some help via the stationery knife from his desk, Aziraphale successfully unraveled the wax seal. Now for the matter of the cork itself, which had Crowley hovering in rapt curiosity over Aziraphale’s shoulder to watch him work the knife in and pry at it, their conversation (and the existence of frivolous miracles for these sorts of tasks) forgotten for the moment. 

There was a split-second foreboding hiss, their only warning before the cork shot off as though it had been sealing away champagne rather than red wine. It didn’t go terribly far before striking the antique rotary telephone atop Aziraphale’s desk, which gave a sharp trill of alarm as it was knocked off its perch to fall utterly to pieces on the floor.

“Oh dear.” Aziraphale spared the fallen phone only that thought and a brief glance as he turned the now open but still faintly hissing bottle over in his hands, checking the label for a date. “Do you suppose this bottle’s gone off, then?”

Crowley, for his part, was too busy doubled over the back of Aziraphale’s chair in laughter to have an answer for him. 

“Magnificent bastard,” he wheezed, surfacing long enough from the cushioned seatback to press a ridiculous giddy kiss to the side of Aziraphale’s ridiculous fluffy head. “You did that on purpose.” 

“I haven’t the faintest what you mean,” said Aziraphale. His face was wine-flushed and warm. “What a shame to lose this _crucial_ mode of communication. It was ever so helpful in conducting business here. A dreadful pity indeed.” 

He feigned a cluck of resigned disapproval to drive it home, but it just as soon bubbled over into a full giggle, spurred along by Crowley’s residual chortling and his hands grasping at him for balance where he was draped over Aziraphale’s shoulders. 

“Whooo-ee,” said Crowley, recovering and remembering how to breathe properly. He liquified the rest of the way over the back of the chair until he’d flopped completely into the seat with Aziraphale, lying sideways across his lap. “What a world we saved, eh?”

“By all accounts, my dear, I recall it largely saved itself.” Aziraphale stroked Crowley’s hair, wriggling contentedly in his seat to make more room for him. “But yes, to your point. An utter mess of contradictions at times, is it not? Equal measures miraculous and vexing.”

“Brilliant and _so_ bloody stupid,” agreed Crowley.

“Both beautiful and heartbreaking.” Aziraphale brushed his fingertips along the spine of the book on his side table, Forster’s posthumous work that was released much too late but somehow just at the right moment. “For the sake of all these dear departed friends, I do hope this exchange today wasn't indicative of the pendulum looking to swing back the other way again. I'd been rather enjoying the recent freedom to love in broad daylight."

"People are clever," said Crowley, reaching up to cup the side of Aziraphale's face, reassuring. "And still got more than enough resilience to go around, they'll see that kind of talk for what it is if they haven't already."

"Quite the optimistic demon, aren't you?"

"Always." And that was true. Crowley had a long list of windfalls to credit (at least in part) to his positive outlook. Present company included, in many ways. "Though it's not without precedent, angel." He grinned, brandishing his mobile. "What? I got curious, looked up the local trending topics. Turns out your caller's wildly one-sided account of this story is doing numbers right now, and even still, you see the top reply there? _'Gay men have nothing to apologize for.'_ There's plenty more like that. Oh, and looks like the lesbians also concur."

That certainly grabbed Aziraphale's curiosity.

He read some of the other messages off of Crowley's screen, paused to cast a thoughtful look over at the broken telephone on the floor, and went back to reading. He did this perhaps once or twice more, and each time the _look_ grew more recognizable. That old angelic instinct to help, to do good. And that wry upturn at the corners of his smile that meant there was also going to be a fair bit of demonic intervention involved.

"Crowley?"

"Mmyeah?"

"In your rather _dashing_ mid-century spy days, how familiar did you become with private encrypted lines? Scrambling numbers, perhaps?"

"Decently familiar. Why, what's on your mind?"

"Oh, just thinking of taking the opportunity for some small adjustments when miracling this phone back together. There were a number of lovely individuals with kind words here," he held up Crowley's mobile, "All rather put out and a little worried by how the shop's telephone number suddenly stopped working. I sense these are men and women in need of a... let's say a bit of a clandestine social circle for like minds."

"A homosexual secret society for the modern era," said Crowley, squirming his way upright. He felt himself grinning ear-to-ear, as he always did when _doing some good_ and _making some trouble_ venn diagrammed in these perfect ways that neither Heaven nor Hell could account for. He landed an eager promise of a kiss upon Aziraphale's delighted lips. "I'll check in with my old vermin network about the wiring. See what we can do."


End file.
